Nazi bullshit makes it onto UFC broadcast

Out of all the wonky things I saw last night during the TUF 10 Finale, the worst was that Hoelzer Reich shirt sponsorship on the broadcast. Now Shawn has already written a post on the site saying this all boils down to ‘some fighter wearing a T-shirt that some people don’t like’, but I take a different view of the situation. To me, that shirt making it onto a UFC broadcast is a fucking embarrassment. Hoelzer Reich is clearly neo-nazi shit disguised as ‘German heritage wear’, as shown by all these facts:

REICH: What, do you think it’s a fucking coincidence that this brand focuses on Nazi Germany themed fashion and has the word Reich in it? Has everyone gone retarded?

Iron Crosses: Yeah, I know. The Iron Cross of the German army has already slipped back into mainstream usage, but it’s still worth noting that it got big in the biker scene post WW2 because of racist skinhead bikers. So that’s one bit of nazi imagery already considered fine again. Now ask yourself how you feel about these next ones.

HR: The abbreviated Hoelzer Reich logo is a clear play on the Nazi SS logo. The Schutzstaffel were Hitler’s master race unit and were responsible for carrying out the majority of the crimes against humanity that made up the Holocaust.

Skulls: Now lots of MMA shirts have skulls, but Hoelzer Reich specifically uses the Totenkopf, which is the SS skull. Look at that shit. It couldn’t be more identical if you pulled the fucking badge off a Nazi officer’s uniform.

A UFC spokesman said the group had “no affiliation with any right-wing groups or ideology.

“The head of UFC UK, Marshall Zelaznik, is Jewish and as a company we would have absolutely nothing to do with anything antisemitic at all.

But does Hoelzer Reich really have “no affiliation with any right-wing groups or ideology”? Well, they’re trying to hide the sketchy stuff as best they can – they’ve scrubbed their website to remove their sponsorship of Nazi music group Westwall and skinhead fighter Niko Puhakka, and don’t have the SS skull and ‘HoeSS’ shirt in their store now. And their Myspace page used to be littered with all sorts of interesting Nazi shit. But since the last time I checked it out, they’ve made their pictures section private and removed their comments section (probably because of all the messages I had seen before from fuckface nazis that started with ‘Heil!’, aka the fuckface nazi ‘yo’).

The more you dig into Hoelzer Reich, the more shit you find connecting them to Nazis. Fascist iconography, fascist language, fascist buddies, and on and on and on. So hey, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and sounds like a duck… it’s probably a duck. And if you don’t have a problem with that, you’re an idiot.